Satan's Plaything

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. He was a perfectly upright man, fearing Elohim and turning away from evil...One day the children of Elohim came in to stand before YHWH. The Satan also came in to stand before YHWH. YHWH said to Satan, "Where have you come from?"
The Satan answered YHWH, "From walking to and fro upon the earth."
YHWH said to Satan, "Have you taken note of my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a perfectly upright man, fearing Elohim and turning away from evil. Moreover, he has maintained his integrity even though you incited me against him, to swallow him up for no reason."
The Satan answered YHWH, "Skin for skin! All that mortals have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bone and see if he does not turn from you and curse you to your face."
YHWH said to the Satan, "O, very well! He is in your hands; only guard his life."
So the Satan went out from the presence of YHWH and afflicted Job with evil sores from the sole of his foot to the top of his head.
Job took a shard of pottery to scrape himself amidst the ashes. His wife said to him, "Will you still retain your integrity? Bless Elohim and die."
He said to her, "You speak like a foolish woman would speak. Should we accept the good things from Elohim and not accept the evil?" In all this, Job did not sin with his lips.

Once upon a time there was a man named Job. Job was a good man. In fact, the Bible says, he was a perfectly upright man – the kind of guy you could count on to do just the right thing in every situation. If you needed someone to be a witness in a case down at the city gate, Job was your man. If you needed a representative for the Board of Trustees at church, Job was the guy. If you needed a solid citizen for the Board of Supervisors, well, you just might look to Job to do that. He was a man who feared God and turned away from evil. A pillar of the community, you might say.

Did I mention that he was also rich? Now that shouldn’t make a difference in whether or not Job was a good man, but you know how people are. As irrational as it is, we sometimes get the impression that because people are rich they have been specially blessed by God. You would have been forgiven for thinking that about Job because he was as wealthy as a man could be in his day. Seven sons and three daughters. 7,000 sheep. 3,000 camels. 500 yoke of oxen. 500 donkeys. Now five hundred donkeys might not sound like a blessing to you, but believe me, this was big stuff in Job’s time. Bling looked a little different back in the day.

But you also know that riches can often cover up a multitude of sins. And even though the rich sometimes seem more blessed we often suspect that there is something rotten at the core of their lives. But this was not true of Job. He prayed for his children every day and offered burnt sacrifices on their behalf on the off chance that they might have cursed God, even inadvertently. He was a good guy.

He was so good that God even started pointing him out to others from the heavenly courts. Once the Satan came in to the courts. Have you heard of the Satan? Maybe you’re thinking red tail, horns, and pitchfork. Or maybe you’re thinking about Dana Carvey and his Church Lady sketch. But you’d be wrong. The Satan in this story was the one of God’s heavenly beings whose job it was to wander the earth looking for creatures that weren’t living up to their potential. You might call the Satan the prosecuting attorney of the heavenly court. Or perhaps the devil’s advocate. Or maybe just the devil. But at any rate, he was just doing his job.

The Satan showed up in God’s presence and God says, “Hey, where have you been?”

The Satan said, “Oh, the usual. I’ve been wandering the earth here and yon, walking to and fro.” It’s a restless life being the accuser.

God said to the Satan, “Hey, did you happen to check out my servant, Job, while you were out there? I know there are some pretty poor specimens out there, but there is nobody like Job. A perfectly upright man. Fears me. Turns away from evil. You’d have a hard time making a case against him.”

Well, this was a challenge to the old Satan and he took it up with God. “Are you telling me that Job doesn’t have any weaknesses? Looks to me like he doesn’t have much reason to curse you since he’s set up so fine. I bet if you took away some of that stuff he enjoys he’d be singing a different tune.”

Now this part of the story is a little disturbing. We don’t like to think of God taking up a bet with the devil, especially when it’s us humans who hang in the balance. But we do know that even the best of folks sometimes end up singing “Hard Times” because of calamities that have befallen them. And when we try to understand the suffering that hangs around our cabin doors…when we try to make sense of it all, we sometimes suspect that even if God doesn’t send those hard times our way, God must allow for it happen. It’s a disturbing thought, but there you have it. And it’s not much of a jump from the confoundedness of our lives in the face of evil to the moral quandary we find ourselves in when God makes Job an unwilling guinea pig for a laboratory test on the effects of suffering. Job gets the attention here, but you could fill in the name of any good person you want and the niggling doubt would be still be there. When you get right down to it, evil doesn’t make sense within the bounds of our God-created cosmos.

At any rate, the Satan is given a free hand and within a matter of hours Job’s blessed life is ruined. Fire falls from heaven and burns up the sheep and attending servants. Chaldean raiders took the camels and slaughtered the servants with them. A tornado hits a tent where all of his children are feasting and every one of them is killed. Even the donkeys are wiped out by a band of marauding Sabeans. Not even the donkeys are spared.

But Job’s response is to tear his clothes, shave his head and fall down to worship God. Did you catch that? He fell down to worship God. He says, “I didn’t have anything when I came into this world and I won’t have anything when I leave it. God gives. God takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” That’s it! No wailing and gnashing of teeth. No lawsuits demanding compensatory damages. No tearful tirades against the injustice of the universe and God in particular broadcast internationally on CNN. Just “I was naked at birth, and I’ll be naked at death. Blessed be the Lord.”

So a few days later the Satan showed up in the heavenly courts again. God said, “Hey, where have you been?”

The Satan said, “Oh, the usual. I’ve been wandering the earth here and yon, walking to and fro.”

God said to the Satan, “Hey, did you happen to check out my servant, Job, while you were out there? There is nobody like Job. A perfectly upright man. Fears me. Turns away from evil. And even now, after all that he’s lost, he still maintains his integrity. Not bad, huh?”

Well, this irked the Satan, so he said, “Well, of course! You wouldn’t let me touch him. People can let go of a lot of stuff as long as it doesn’t get to their own skin. You let me afflict him personally and we’ll see how much longer he ‘maintains his integrity.’” Once again, God agreed to the terms with the restriction that the Satan could not kill Job.

Within minutes Job was suffering with evil sores over his entire body. What do you think Job did then? He took a piece of an old broken pot, probably one broken in the disasters that had befallen him, and he went to sit on a heap of ashes, probably one left over from the feast tent that had burned, and he scraped his skin with the broken pottery.

Job’s wife came over to him. Now I really don’t know anything about Job’s wife and I hesitate to say anything ill about people I don’t know, but it sounds to me like she must have been possessed by…I don’t know…Satan because she talks just like him. She looks at Job in his misery and says, “When will you give it up? How long will you maintain your integrity?” (Where have we heard those words before?) “Why don’t you just curse God and die?”

But Job is made of different stuff than most folks. He tells his wife that she’s talking like a fool and then he says, “God sends us good things and we receive them gladly. When God sends us evil how should we react?” Now the Bible says Job didn’t sin in any of this, but that last question really sticks. When God sends us evil, how should we react? That’s really the question that dominates the whole rest of the book of Job. Job’s friends come over to be with him in his desolation and for about a week they get it right. They just sit there with him in silence. But then they start talking and what they talk about is what I want to spend the next three weeks talking about – Why do hard times come and what do we do when they do come our way?

If we end the Job story right here, we’ve got some very disturbing answers to that question. Hard times come because there is something working actively against us. It’s worse than fate or chance. If bad things happened just because the universe is made in such a way that bad things are an inevitable part of life, well, that’s scary but it’s understandable. That’s how deists and rationalists see the world. It runs according to some grand physical laws which ensure that the system as a whole survives, but along the way individuals sometimes suffer loss and ruin and all of us eventually suffer death. You can’t complain about the moral injustice of a world created like this. You can’t cry out against the death of an infant or the flooding of a nor’easter because those are just part of the grand scheme of things. If we didn’t believe in a God who cares for and is intimately involved in the universe, we wouldn’t have any reason to ask the question of why hard times come. Hard times come because that’s the way of the world.

Fate is a little easier to swallow, too. Fate says that what happens is in some sense foreordained. Hard times happen because it was determined beforehand and the proper response to them is to accept your fate grimly and perhaps with some dignity. But God is far in the background in the workings of fate. In fact, fate is a kind of god – an uncaring, unconcerned force that we can condemn with loud, righteous anger, but to what effect? No one ever said that fate cared about us.

But we, we Christians, do say that God cares about us and the question of suffering is one that only people who believe in God must seriously struggle with. Those who don’t believe in God have no grounds to question the injustice of suffering because in their worldview there is no moral agent at the center of the universe. When they cry to the heavens, to whom are they calling out? All that they can do is to taunt believers for their naïveté in holding to a world where God still lives. And what are they left with but a disenchanted world that offers no ultimate reconciliation, no comfort, and no redemption for the sufferer? It is for believers to struggle with a universe where suffering matters and where hard times point to the deepest questions of life and death.

Job offers a chilling introduction to that struggle. It suggests that the world is not just a neutral sort of sphere in which bad things happen and good things happen and there is some kind of cosmic equilibrium to the whole thing. In Job’s world there are agents afoot, wandering the earth here and yon, walking to and fro, and seeking to do us ill. We could end up Satan’s playthings because that is what he seeks. God has intentions for us, as God had intentions for Job. God seeks human beings who will be perfectly upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. But even those who live God-fearing, evil-despising lives are not immune from the forces that work against God’s intentions. We will be battered, but the question is whether or not we can see, in the shadows and deaths of this world, the world God is bringing to birth.

I have to admit, that I am one of those fingernail Christians. There are times when I feel like I am holding on to my faith by my fingernails. Does that ever happen to you? Thank God my relationship with God is not determined by how well I am able to hold onto my theology on a given day because there are times when it is shaken.

We could pick up the newspaper on any day and find something that would shake us to our cores but this week provided a particularly horrible example. A man in Pennsylvania, Charles Carl Roberts, who was haunted by who knows what demons, went into an Amish schoolhouse and sent out the adults and the boys and then shot the ten girls. It’s such an unspeakable act I find it hard to even say it out loud. It’s the kind of thing that makes you reach for your children and pull them in close.

It’s also the kind of thing, that had it happened in another community with other people might have looked like all of our other modern America tragedy sites. There would be televised funeral services with speakers from across the country. There would be chain-link fences covered in ribbons and teddy bears and reporters trying to wrench every bit of anguish they could from the traumatized survivors.

But that sort of spectacle was on the sidelines this week because the Amish are a different sort of community. Deeply religious, they have their own ways. On Thursday they began the burials. 34 buggies drawn by horses made their way through the farmland for the first of the funerals. They held them in homes, which is where the Amish hold their ceremonies. Two ministers presided at each service and at one of them they told the story of the earth’s creation from the book of Genesis. Not much was said about the deceased because the focus was on God – how God’s love filled the whole world, how God’s love created this beautiful yet tragically scarred earth and all its peoples, and how God was continuing to do the work of creation until all the work is done and all the children brought home. They buried little Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7 years old, in a plain, handmade white dress and a very simple coffin. Then they went to funerals for Marian and Mary Liz and Lena. On Friday they buried Anna Mae. Hard times. They don’t come any harder.

But in the midst of their grief these folks did something else that didn’t fit the pattern. As families made food to take to those who grieved, something that is just so natural that it’s a nearly universal custom, as they made food they took some to Marie Roberts, the husband of the man who killed the children before killing himself. They took her food, because they knew she had suffered a loss, too. And they invited her to attend one of the funerals. And they offered their forgiveness because it is what Christians are told to do. Told to do because it doesn’t come naturally. What’s natural is to hate and to strike out and to flail against a world in which such funerals have to take place. But even in such darkness, when the forces of death threaten to overcome us, God is willing life and we know that because people whose lives are formed by the savior who submitted even to death on a cross brought food and forgiveness instead of bitterness and more darkness.

David Bentley Hart, whom I will quote over the next two weeks, says that the Christian vision of the world is not an easy one. It is, he says, a “moral and spiritual labor. The Christian eye sees (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere ‘nature,’ and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy.” [i] In the valley of the shadow of death, it is not easy to see the joy, and we are right to believe when hard times come that things are not as they should be, that the evil is not what God intends, and that there are forces afoot in the universe that would resist God’s will even though they cannot have ultimate victory. But we should not cover over the moral and spiritual labor of struggling with the meaning of suffering by saying that God somehow gives us evil so as to bring about a greater good. Evil is never the will of God. God does not need the death of a child to be great or to reveal God’s greatness. God is making all things new and God will not lose anything or anyone in bringing this to be.

So Stephen Foster’s song is one that God sings with us as we glimpse the inbreaking of the kingdom and await the day of Satan’s final defeat. “Tis the song, the sigh of the weary/Hard times, hard times, come again no more/Many days you have lingered around my cabin door/Oh hard times come again no more.” And there is more yet to come. Much more to be said about God’s victory and the end of hard times. Next week, Job talks back. Thanks be to God.

[i] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005], p. 58.